Cancún, Yucatán Peninsula, Aztlán

[Cancún continues to attract many tourists each year with its pearly beaches, authentic cuisine, and slightly hedonistic partying. Although the latter is experiencing decline, thanks in part to the government's national crackdown to impose "decency". However, I do not have the privilege of interviewing Doctor Roberto Garcia-Ramirez on the beach. Instead, I sit inside Doctor Garcia-Ramirez's office on the second floor of the Hospital Galenia. Due to the damage the infrastructure has suffered from the recent hurricane, power within the city and surrounding areas are only given limited amounts of power. As a result, the air conditioning is barely functioning, which makes us both sweat, but thankfully not profusely. Going against hospital protocol, he lights up a slightly crumpled cigarette.]

Mexico had a lot on its plate when the shit hit the fan. Drugs, corruption, a relatively high homicide rate. So to state that our country was one of the worst hit countries on this side of the Atlantic is putting it in simple terms. Not only were the dead rising a national issue, but the drug cartels scattered across the country, especially the ones closer to the northern border, also made handling the crisis during both the early stages and the Gran Pánico even more difficult. But thankfully most of them were wiped out during the Panic and the stalemate years, so I guess you can say that's one good thing that came out of it.

For most nations, they were under the assumption that the virus was a strain of "African rabies". To us, our ignorant belief was that it was our drug problem causing the crisis. Well...at first, anyway.

My brother, God rest his soul, worked for Los Federales in Coahuila, where he conducted dozens of drug busts every year, in cooperation with the authorities in Texas. He worked for them for thirteen years before becoming a border guard on the Arizona border. He had seen many things throughout his career, ranging from people trying to cross the border in suitcases, to people trying to sneak in narcotics that they kept in the same place that the Jews has to sneak in valuables into concentration camps in World War II. We would talk on the phone at least once a week, where our conversations would range from him discussing whatever crazy fiasco that happened at the border station that week, to personal things like what he was doing with his family that weekend or something like that.

At that time, we didn't know what was happening in China, or other parts of the world for that matter, so when reports were being made about people attacking our border guards like mad men, most of us just assumed the people attacking were just high on whatever homemade narcotic that they were trying to smuggle across the border.

Care to elaborate further?

These kinds of things had been the norm for Mexico since the 1970s, when Escobar broke a deal with Mexican traffickers after his Caribbean and South Florida routes were dismantled by an intensified police presence. Although the drug war didn't "begin" until 2006, narcotics is something we have been dealing with for decades.

But keep in mind that the first reports that came in were from the border areas, and many drug busts had been happening around that time frame. We were just under the assumption that those vile animals had created something so potent that it was making people act more insane than the crudest meth or heroin ever could. So potent that they were immune to both bullets and pepper spray. So can you really blame us for not realizing the truth?

But wasn't that theory disproven when autopsies were performed and the reports were released?

Sure they released the reports, but all that was said was that the victims had been viciously mauled. And all the television said at the time was that border tensions were getting worse, but that the government was "handling it".

And they said nothing when these border guards or civilians reanimated?

[The doctor doesn't answer my question directly. Instead, he continues with his previous monologue.] They didn't know what to make of the zombies that had been killed, as they didn't have a single trace of drugs in their systems. They tried to keep things under wraps, so...

But the theory was eventually disproven?

Oh of course! People could rest easy knowing that their country's reputation was still in the same spot and not worse. But now that fear was replaced by "African rabies", following the outbreak in South Africa...[He changes the subject abruptly.] I still can't believe that our police, or even our military, weren't able to at least maintain half of their ranks when the reclamation was put into action. I mean, even when it came to dealing with the lowest ranking drug gang, they looked like they were ready for all-out war: head-to-toe riot gear, high-powered assault rifles and shotguns, tear gas. But if Yonkers was any indication, our military and police suffered virtually identical unpreparedness and losses.

Didn't you receive any news from your brother regarding the incidents?

Oh yes, I did, and he kept me informed just like he did everything else. But it was nothing regarding the true nature of the virus. He was just as confused as everyone else was. I remember this one time, he told me of an incident that happened at his station:

They had stopped a van to conduct a drug search. They had dogs with them to sniff out any drugs that might have been hidden. Both dogs starting barking their heads off once they neared the rear of the van, but it wasn't because they found any drugs, but rather the man that was tied up in the trunk. They had their hands and feet wrapped in duct tape, with a dirty cloth gagging them. One of his men removed the cloth from the man's mouth, and immediately felt the man bite down on his hand, ripping off a few of his fingers. My brother, always quick on his feet, withdrew his gun and shot it in the head, almost on reflex. He then told me that the guard that was bitten was hauled away to a hospital, but was never heard from again. As for the two men trying to sneak him across the border, they were immediately hauled away for questioning.

Can you please describe to me your personal experience?

Calm down, gringo, I'm getting to that. I had graduated from La Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara in 2003. I then moved to a relatively nice apartment in the city to begin my practice. At the time, our country's health care was not in the best shape, as we had not yet established universal health care. Sure, we had the appropriate equipment and medicine to accomplish this, but many Mexicans only had access to the basics. But even after the government implemented El Seguro Popular [1], the majority of the population still did not have the most advanced medical care until around the Great Panic began to set in.

Like our neighbor to the north, we were completely ignorant of the threat that was creeping around the corner. Phalanx had been issued in great numbers all across the country, in keeping with the NAFTA [2] treaty. The people were perfectly fine with taking the vaccine; malaria had been going down in the country when the new universal health care was put into place, so the public was more than willing to take another shot, this time to avoid catching the "African rabies".

And it really didn't help that the cartels were trying to make a quick buck off of it too. Whenever they couldn't get their vile hands on the real thing, they resorted to trying to make crude versions of it, and began administrating it to their members and clients. Many Mexicans were slaughtered by the dead, but just think of all the young Mexicans who died as a result of this false sense of security, most of them dying as a result of the crude drug not cooperating with their immune system. And that's not including the ones who had successfully managed to sneak people in the United States to seek American medical treatment for their bite wounds [3]. It was bad enough that Phalanx didn't do shit in stopping the virus, but the poorly-made Mexican knockoff and human trafficking just made our death toll worse.

I myself was especially sure we would be safe. With so many people around me freaking out over this new bug going around, I was confident that we wouldn't have to deal with it. With that new miracle drug, and our newly implemented health care system, why should we have to worry? Oh how foolish was I...

[He finishes his cigarette, dumping the butt into an empty metal pen holder on his desk.] I distinctly remember the first patient that was rushed to the emergency room. He was a young man, nineteen according to his records, and had obtained a hideous bite on his left forearm. It looked like some animal had torn away so much flesh that you could see a little bit of bone. The wound was leaking a mixture of blood and some sort of black ooze that looked like pus. He was sweating profusely and was beginning to lose the color of his face. We followed all the basic procedures: we asked for his name, where did he live, and all that protocol shit. Unfortunately, he was in too much pain to respond so we had to pull his information from his driver's license. His name was Gabriel Enrique Fontina.

I determined that he would have to have his arm amputated, so I had one of my resident nurses fetch me the tools necessary for the procedure. But during said procedure, after I had just cut through the bone, he flatlined. I tried chest compressions and even mouth-to-mouth, but it proved futile. I pronounced him dead at 9:32 PM.

More and more patients began to fill up the rooms, and before long, we were forced to move patients into the hallways. Yes, there were that many people who had been attacked! My coworkers and I didn't know what to think of it. The majority of the patients, like the first one, didn't have the energy to answer any of our questions, and the ones that could speak did so only in broken Spanish. More kept coming, and by the time midnight rolled around, we had over sixty bitten people under our care. Most of their bite wounds weren't horrible enough to require amputation, but that did not change the fact that it was still an unpleasant sight. We had so many new patients that, believe it or not, we eventually ran out of morphine. When some of them had been stabilized, we were able to get some answers from them.

I remember I was tending to a middle-aged woman. She was banged up pretty bad; large chunks taken out of both arms, the top half of her left ear missing, and her clothes and face smeared with both blood, and that same strange black pus I saw in Señor Fontina's wound. The morphine had kicked in and she started answering some questions. She said that the "devils" came from nowhere and everywhere at once, preying upon anyone and everyone.

It was then that everything started going downhill. First one of my colleagues, Doctor Sanchez, called me into the adjacent room; one of the patients had flatlined. Doctor Sanchez tried chest compressions, but it was to no avail. He leaned in to tried to hear any breathing, but then...the patient bit him, right in the neck. I ran over to my coworker, and tried to pull him from the man, but the patient had an iron grip. I had to call for help, so a young nurse came in, and after a struggle, we succeeded in removing Sanchez from the patient. Sanchez fell to the floor, clutching his bloody neck and gasping for air as he began to choke on his own blood. As the nurse tried to stabilize him, I glanced over to the patient, and he had sat up, trying to reach out to me. I fled the room, abandoning the nurse and Sanchez. [He looks down, clearly in regret.]

I made it to the hallway, and saw that others were beginning to reanimate. One had fallen off his gurney and was gnawing at a nurse's ankle, while another one had stumbled out of his room, his gown stained with that same black gunk. I look into the room across from me and I see the now undead patient tearing into his crying wife's arm. I look to my right and see another doctor wrestling with one of them, while another doctor was trying to pry one zombie off of one of the resident doctors.

I ran to my left, pushing past a colleague that was holding his bleeding arm. Before I could make it to the desk at the end of the corridor, one of them emerged from the corner, letting out a horrendous growl. I blocked it by pushing my arm against its neck, but it succeeded in ripping the sleeve on my lab coat. I darted my eyes, and spotted a cart of instruments next to the wall. I grabbed a scalpel and jammed it into its neck. The only thing I got out of that was my glove-covered hand being drenched in that black pus. Have you ever smelt that stuff? Honestly, it smells worse than anything you can imagine. When this didn't work, my adrenaline made me remove the blade and drive through its forehead, just above the right eye. With that, the thing stopped moving and released me, collapsing to the blood-stained tiled floor. I made a run for the double doors past the desk, when I turned back one last time to see Señor Fontina. He was tearing into the stomach of one of the patients on the gurneys when I ran out the double doors.

The elevator wouldn't come up fast enough, and another dead one tried to grab me, so I said, "Fuck it" and ran for the stairwell. After practically running down the stairs and entering the lobby, I saw more dead ones than the floor above. The security guard, Marco, was shooting into the stomach of one that was coming at him. He must have wasted eight bullets before the woman lunged at him and sunk her teeth into his cheek. I dropped the scalpel I was holding and grabbed Marco's gun that he had dropped on the floor when he was bit. I ran out the front doors in a hurry, killing two more of those things and pushing away a few others as I ran for my car. The shitty thing wouldn't start, but eventually came to life after the fourth or fifth time. I backed out, and drove like a madman, hitting my fair share of dead ones along the way. I could barely see with all the black gunk staining my windshield and headlights, but I somehow made it out of the parking lot and onto the main road.

Where did you plan on going?

I didn't know, and I didn't care. I just had to get as far away from the hospital, as far away from Guadalajara, as possible. This was the beginning of the city's descent into madness, and I really didn't want to be a part of it. Call me a coward if you'd like, but I didn't want to stick around when the police were overrun. I tried calling my brother multiple times, but the lines were jammed; too many people trying to use their phones at the same time. Even when I got out of the city, I kept trying and trying and trying to contact him, hoping to hear his voice pick up on the other end. I must have left like a thousand messages; I would keep my phone on at all times, just by the off-chance I would hear that familiar ringtone. My brother's ringtone never rang again... [He looks at a picture on his desk. It's a picture of him in his youth, standing next to the man I assume is his brother. They appear to be standing outside some sort of federal building. His brother is dressed in his border guard attire, while the doctor is dressed in civilian clothes. Both wear smiles on their faces, their arms around each other's shoulders. I notice that the doctor is trying really hard to fight back tears.]

Little did I know that other cities across the country were beginning to experience nearly identical incidents. Acapulco, Monterrey, Chihuahua, Ciudad Juárez, and even el capital...

So to wrap this up, if you're wondering who do I blame for what happened to our country, I place the blame on three things: the government for not doing their job of protecting us and keeping us informed, the cartels and gangs for their role in trafficking and the Phalanx-knockoff, and the rest of us for believing that shit was under control.

[He reaches into his bottom desk drawer and removes a small glass and a bottle of tequila, filling up the glass halfway. He shoots me a look when he notices my reaction.]

You didn't see the cigarette, and you certainly didn't see this, comprende? [He downs the entire glass in one gulp.]

[1]- El Seguro Popular (Popular Health Insurance) was the medical program implemented in 2004 by the Mexican government in order to offer medical assistance to the less financially fortunate.

[2]- NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, was a pre-war treaty that established a trilateral trade bloc between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The agreement was first signed on January 1st, 1994.

[3]- According to both pre-war and post-war records, most of the first cases reported in the American Southwest were Mexican immigrants, as well as a small handful of immigrants from Central America.